GNOME roadmap updated, version 3 pushed back to late 2010

The GNOME desktop environment will get its first major version update since …

The GNOME desktop environment is undergoing a significant transformation. The developers behind the open source project are working on version 3.0, the first major overhaul since 2002. The GNOME release team has updated the roadmap and has set September 2010 as the target for the launch of GNOME 3.0. The release team has also announced the new module decisions for the upcoming 2.30 release, which is scheduled for April.

The future of GNOME is a matter that has been discussed extensively within the Linux community. Some of the most important factors that have contributed to GNOME's popularity among commercial Linux distributors are its incremental development model and consistent release cycle. A major overhaul, and the potential disruption that it could bring, are not entirely consistent with the GNOME philosophy. This made the prospect of a 3.0 release somewhat contentious among GNOME users and developers.

After extensive discussion, the GNOME release team decided last year to take on the task. The GNOME 2.30 release would be dubbed 3.0 and would be used as an opportunity to cut some of the deprecated cruft and update the platform's underlying infrastructure. The plan was to avoid major user-visible changes in favor of a simple clean-up under the hood. As the plans surrounding version 3.0 evolved, it became clear that more substantive changes were desirable. Version 3.0 will introduce a new desktop shell built with the Clutter toolkit and will also add a new tool called Zeitgeist that offers a journal-like alternative to conventional file management.

These components are still under heavy development and aren't quite mature enough yet for mainstream adoption. This and other factors have compelled the release team to push 3.0 back by one cycle, setting September 2010 as the new target for release. The decision was made based on status information that the release team collected from GNOME contributors earlier this month. The announcement was made by this week by release team member Vincent Untz on the GNOME developer mailing list.

"GNOME 3.0 will be released in September 2010, and in the meantime, we will release GNOME 2.30 in March 2010, continuing our long-standing tradition of six-months releases," he wrote. "The release date for 3.0 was not set in stone: while we're using a strict schedule that allows us to release GNOME every six months, GNOME is above all using quality-based release engineering. That's why our community wants GNOME 3.0 to be fully working for users and why we believe September is more appropriate."

The release team has also revealed the new module decisions for GNOME 2.30. The module decision process typically occurs at the start of every cycle through a submission and review process that is accompanied by extensive discussion on the GNOME desktop developer mailing list.

The Vala programming language has been accepted as an external dependency, meaning that GNOME application developers are now free to use it to build core desktop applications. The Clutter graphics framework was rejected during this round because there are some concerns about Intel's copyright assignment policies for the project. The release team believes that the issue can be resolved during this cycle and says that Clutter is still on track to be a key part of GNOME 3. A new configuration storage system called dconf was not accepted during this cycle, but has been tentatively approved for GNOME 3. It is likely that it will eventually replace the current GConf system.

CouchDB, a document-oriented database system that is being adopted by Canonical for its UbuntuOne service, was rejected as a GNOME dependency during this cycle. Although there is a growing amount of interest in CouchDB, the GNOME community believes that it is too early for it to be adopted widely on the desktop. The GNOME Global Menu, which provides a Mac-like unified menubar for the desktop panel, was rejected because there are still unanswered questions about its technical soundness and it doesn't align with the general vision for GNOME 3.

Although GNOME 2.30 is a transitional step between the 2.x series and 3.0, the developers say that it will not deviate from GNOME's typical commitment to reliability. It will arrive on schedule in March and will start to show up in popular Linux distros in April.